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Rotimi Fani-Kayode

It’s easy to compare Fani-Kayode to Robert Mapplethorpe: both photographers favored black male subjects and died tragically young, in 1989, from AIDS. (Fani-Kayode was just thirty-four.) But Fani-Kayode’s eroticism is at once subtler and more intensely felt than Mapplethorpe’s, and the Nigerian-born artist was a black man himself. To create the images here, which were made in the last years of his life, the artist stocked his studio with simple props–African masks, draped fabric, flowers, and fruit—and staged ritualistic performances. It’s striking how timely many of these pictures feel; the portrait of a man peering out from the shadow of a hooded cape is a study in struggle and determination.